In the last few weeks we looked at the Proactive Behaviour and Proactive and Reactive language too, and it is important for us to look at how we define Proactivity in our effectiveness process.
In discovering the basic principle of the nature of man, Dr. Covey describes an accurate self-map from which he began to develop the first and most basic habit of a highly effective person in any environment, the habit of proactivity. While the word proactivity is now fairly common in management literature, it is a word you won't find in most dictionaries. It means more than merely taking the initiative. It means that as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behaviour is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values. We have the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.
Look at the word responsibility - ''response-ability - the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility and do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behaviour. Their behaviour is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feelings. Because we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are functions of conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us.
In making such a choice, we become reactive. Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn't, it affects their attitude and their performance. Proactive people can carry their own weather with them and whether it rains or shines makes no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their value is to produce good quality work, it isn't a function of whether the weather is conducive to it or not.
Reactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the 'social weather'. When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don't, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behaviour of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.
The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, conditions, and their environment. Proactive people are driven by values - carefully thought about, selected and internalized values. Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response.
As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, ''No one can hurt you without your consent.'' In the words of Gandhi, "They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.''
As Dr. Covey says "it's not what people do to us that hurts us but our chosen response to what people do to us that hurts us".
I admit this is very hard to accept emotionally, especially if we have had years and years of explaining our misery in the name of circumstance or someone else's behaviour. But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.'' that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.'' This is something we all have to seriously think about. In essence Proactivity is nothing but the opposite of being reactive in any circumstance. |
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